Thursday, January 31, 2013
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Note for Third Year Students
Semester starts on 2.2.2013 and we will be discussing about Road Not Taken by Robert Frost in our first class. Do read the poem before you come to class.
Third Year 1st semi : Poetry Texts Updated 17.1.2014
On His Blindness by John Milton
(1608-1674)
When I consider how my light
is spent
Ere half my days in this
dark world and wide,
And that one talent
which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless,
though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my
Maker, and present
My true account, lest He
returning chide,
'Doth God exact day
labor, light denied?'
I fondly ask. But
Patience to prevent
That murmur soon
replies, 'God doth not need
Either man's work or his
own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they
serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at
his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and
ocean without rest;
They also serve who only
stand and wait.'
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a
yellow wood,
And sorry I could not
travel both
And be one traveller,
long I stood
And looked down one as
far as I could
To where it bent in the
undergrowth;
Then took the other, as
just as fair,
And having perhaps the
better claim,
Because it was grassy
and wanted wear;
Though as for that the
passing there
Had worn them really
about the same,
And both that morning
equally lay
In leaves no step had
trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for
another day!
Yet knowing how way
leads on to way,
I doubted if I should
ever come back.
I shall be telling this
with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages
hence:
Two roads diverged in a
wood, and I--
I took the one less
traveled by,
And that has made all
the difference.
Gerontion by T S Eliot
Thou hast nor youth nor age
But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming of both.
Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
My house is a decayed house,
And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.
I an old man,
A dull head among windy spaces.
Signs are taken for wonders. "We would see a sign":
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger
In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering Judas,
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero
With caressing hands, at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room;
By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fraulein von Kulp
Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles
Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
An old man in a draughty house
Under a windy knob.
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What's not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.
The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last
We have not reached conclusion, when I
Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last
I have not made this show purposelessly
And it is not by any concitation
Of the backward devils.
I would meet you upon this honestly.
I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use it for your closer contact?
These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled
Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits
Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn,
White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,
And an old man driven by the Trades
To a sleepy corner.
Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
MCM XIV by Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;
And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day--
And the countryside not caring:
The place names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat's restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word--the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
The clod and the pebble by William Blake
"Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair."
So sung a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:
"Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."
To Autumn by John Keats (1795-1821)
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
Don`t talk to Me about Matisse
Don`t talk to me about Matisse, don`t talk to me
about Gauguin, or even
the earless painter van Gogh,
& the woman reclining on a blood-spread...
the aboriginal shot by the great white hunter Matisse
with a gun with two nostrils, the aboriginal
crucified by Gauguin -- the syphilis-spreader, the yellow
obesity.
Don`t talk to me about Matisse...
the European style of 1900, the tradition of the studio
where the nude style woman reclines forever
on a sheet of blood.
Talk to me instead about the culture generally --
how the murderers were sustained
by the beauty robbed of savages: to our remote
villages the painters came, and our white-washed
mud-huts were splattered with gunfire.
by Lakdasa Wikkramasinha
The Cobra
"Your great hood was like a flag
hung up there
in the village.
Endlessly the people came to Weragoda -
watched you (your eyes like braziers)
standing somewhat afar.
They stood before you in obeisance, Death
The power of the paramitas, took you to heaven however.
The sky, vertical, is where you are now
showing the sun, curling round
and round my mind.
They whisper death - stories
but it was only my woman Dunkiriniya,
The very lamp of my heart,
that died
If by Rudyard Kipling
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son!
The Unknown Citizen (Poem by W. H. Auden)
(To JS/07 M 378 This Marble Monument Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a
saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in a hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his
generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
BIRDS, BEASTS AND RELATIVES
We saw three leopard and a bear
Four herds of elephant, a pair
Of nesting paradise flycatchers
And hordes of teal in bigger batches
Than (they said) the time before .........
It has been quite a while you know
Since last I visited the park
The passing years have left their mark.
I cannot get much pleasure now
Identifying bull or cow
A quarter mile across the plain
Re-visiting, again, again
A dung-heap, hoping other species
Like Man, return to their own faeces -
For once you've seen Man on the kill
The spotted hunter fails to thrill.
Yes, man's a splendid predatory
Beast - with a fine hereditary
Chauvinistic sense of smell
And hunter's eye he claims can tell
The subtle shades of class or race
That doom the quarry to the chase
But Man, quite unlike beasts, in lots
Of instances CAN CHANGE HIS SPOTS.
Oh, man's adept at camouflage
Far better than the whole m‚nage
At moulting and at sloughing skin
Or just discreetly blending in
With concrete jungle - leafy glade
Creative use of light and shade
To hide forbidden private parts.
So let us exercise what arts
We have and join the savage herd
Cry out for blood and spread the word
Let nature do the worst it can
Best quarry for Mankind is Man
Sympathy by Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872-1906)
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled
Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits
Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn,
White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,
And an old man driven by the Trades
To a sleepy corner.
Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
MCM XIV by Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;
And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day--
And the countryside not caring:
The place names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat's restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word--the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
The clod and the pebble by William Blake
"Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair."
So sung a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:
"Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."
To Autumn by John Keats (1795-1821)
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
Don`t talk to Me about Matisse
Don`t talk to me about Matisse, don`t talk to me
about Gauguin, or even
the earless painter van Gogh,
& the woman reclining on a blood-spread...
the aboriginal shot by the great white hunter Matisse
with a gun with two nostrils, the aboriginal
crucified by Gauguin -- the syphilis-spreader, the yellow
obesity.
Don`t talk to me about Matisse...
the European style of 1900, the tradition of the studio
where the nude style woman reclines forever
on a sheet of blood.
Talk to me instead about the culture generally --
how the murderers were sustained
by the beauty robbed of savages: to our remote
villages the painters came, and our white-washed
mud-huts were splattered with gunfire.
by Lakdasa Wikkramasinha
The Cobra
"Your great hood was like a flag
hung up there
in the village.
Endlessly the people came to Weragoda -
watched you (your eyes like braziers)
standing somewhat afar.
They stood before you in obeisance, Death
The power of the paramitas, took you to heaven however.
The sky, vertical, is where you are now
showing the sun, curling round
and round my mind.
They whisper death - stories
but it was only my woman Dunkiriniya,
The very lamp of my heart,
that died
If by Rudyard Kipling
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son!
The Unknown Citizen (Poem by W. H. Auden)
(To JS/07 M 378 This Marble Monument Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a
saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in a hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his
generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
BIRDS, BEASTS AND RELATIVES
We saw three leopard and a bear
Four herds of elephant, a pair
Of nesting paradise flycatchers
And hordes of teal in bigger batches
Than (they said) the time before .........
It has been quite a while you know
Since last I visited the park
The passing years have left their mark.
I cannot get much pleasure now
Identifying bull or cow
A quarter mile across the plain
Re-visiting, again, again
A dung-heap, hoping other species
Like Man, return to their own faeces -
For once you've seen Man on the kill
The spotted hunter fails to thrill.
Yes, man's a splendid predatory
Beast - with a fine hereditary
Chauvinistic sense of smell
And hunter's eye he claims can tell
The subtle shades of class or race
That doom the quarry to the chase
But Man, quite unlike beasts, in lots
Of instances CAN CHANGE HIS SPOTS.
Oh, man's adept at camouflage
Far better than the whole m‚nage
At moulting and at sloughing skin
Or just discreetly blending in
With concrete jungle - leafy glade
Creative use of light and shade
To hide forbidden private parts.
So let us exercise what arts
We have and join the savage herd
Cry out for blood and spread the word
Let nature do the worst it can
Best quarry for Mankind is Man
Sympathy by Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872-1906)
Note for Second Year Students
Dear Second year students, semester III starts on 2.2.2013. The syllabus is updated for you with the texts. Do read the texts before you come to the class. We will be discussing Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred Lord Tennyson on the first class.
Second Year 1st semi : Texts Updated 17.1.2014
Charge of the Light Brigade- Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!' he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd ?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'd:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.
Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel'd from the sabre-stroke
Shatter'd and sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.
When can their glory fade ?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder'd.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!
Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime. --
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my help less sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
A Far Cry from Africa by Derek Walcott
A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa, Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
'Waste no compassion on these separate dead!'
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?
Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilizations dawn
From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.
Again brutish necessity wipes its hands
Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?
How to Die by Siegfried Sassoon
Dark clouds are smouldering into red
While down the craters morning burns.
The dying soldier shifts his head
To watch the glory that returns;
He lifts his fingers toward the skies
Where holy brightness breaks in flame;
Radiance reflected in his eyes,
And on his lips a whispered name.
You’d think, to hear some people talk,
That lads go West with sobs and curses,
And sullen faces white as chalk,
Hankering for wreaths and tombs and hearses.
But they’ve been taught the way to do it
Like Christian soldiers; not with haste
And shuddering groans; but passing through it
With due regard for decent taste.
The Good-Morrow by John Donne
I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?
’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.
And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.
The fisherman mourned by his wife by Patrick Fernando
When you were not quite thirty and sun
Had not tanned you in to old-boat brown,
When you were not quite thirty and not begun
To be embittered like the rest, nor grown
Obsessed with death, then would you come
Hot with continence upon the sea,
Chaste as a gull flying pointed home,
In haste to see me!
Now that, being dead, you are beyond detection,
And I need not be discreet, let us confess
It was not love that married us nor affection,
But elders' persuasion, not even loneliness.
Recall how first you were impatient and afraid,
My eye were open in the dark unlike in love,
Trembling, lest in fear, you'll let me go maid,
Trembling on the other hand, for my virginity.
Three months the monsoon thrashed the sea, and you
Remained at home; the sky cracked like a shell
In thunder, and the rain broke through.
At last when pouring ceased the storm winds fell,
When gulls returned new-plumed and wild,
When in our wind-torn flamboyante
New buds broke, I was with child
My face was an while telling you, and voice fell low,
And you seemed full of guilt and not to know
Whether to repent or rejoice over the situation.
You nodded at the ground and went to the sea.
But soon I was to you more than God or temptation,
And so were you to me.
Men come and go, some say they understand,
Our children weep, the youngest think you are fast asleep;
Theirs is fear and wonderment,
You had grown so familiar as my hand,
That I cannot with simple grief
Assuage dismemberment.
Outside the wind despoils of leaf
Trees that it used to nurse;
Once more the flamboyante is torn,
The sky cracks like a shell again,
So someone practical has gone
To make them bring the hearse
Before the rain
SONNET 116
|
PARAPHRASE
|
|
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
|
Let me
not declare any reasons why two
|
|
Admit impediments. Love is not love
|
True-minded
people should not be married. Love is not love
|
|
Which alters when it alteration finds,
|
Which
changes when it finds a change in circumstances,
|
|
Or bends with the remover to remove:
|
Or
bends from its firm stand even when a lover is unfaithful:
|
|
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
|
Oh no!
it is a lighthouse
|
|
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
|
That
sees storms but it never shaken;
|
|
It is the star to every wandering bark,
|
Love is
the guiding north star to every lost ship,
|
|
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be
taken.
|
Whose
value cannot be calculated, although its altitude can be measured.
|
|
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and
cheeks
|
Love is
not at the mercy of Time, though physical beauty
|
|
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
|
Comes
within the compass of his sickle.
|
|
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
|
Love
does not alter with hours and weeks,
|
|
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
|
But,
rather, it endures until the last day of life.
|
|
If this be error and upon me proved,
|
If I am
proved wrong about these thoughts on love
|
|
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
|
Then I
recant all that I have written, and no man has ever [truly] loved.
|
SONNET 55
|
PARAPHRASE |
Third Year 1st Semi: English Literature Updated 17.01.2014
English and American Poetry
-
John
Milton: 1608-1674 On His Blindness
-
William
Blake: 1757-1827, The Clod and the Pebble
-
John
Keats: 1795-1821, Ode to autumn
-
Robert
Frost: 1874-1963, Road Not Taken
-
T.S.
Eliot: 1888, Gerontion
-
W.H.
Auden, Unknown Citizen
-
Philip
Larkin: 1922-1985, Mcm xiv
Sri
Lankan and Post-colonial Poetry
-
Lakdasa
Wickramasinghe: Don’t talk to me about Matisse, The Cobra
-
Richard
de Zoysa, Birds, Beasts and Relatives
-
Rudyard
Kipling, IF
-
Paul
Lawrence Dunbar: I know why the Caged Bird Sings
Short Stories
-
Sithy
Hameed: Death in Life,
-
V.
S. Naipaul: My Aunt’s Gold Teeth
-
Somerset
Maugham: Sanatorium
Novel
-
George
Orwell: Animal Farm OR
-
Charles
Dickens: The Tale of Two Cities
Drama
- Shakespeare : Merchant of Venice OR
- Shakespeare : Romeo and Juliet
Drama
- Shakespeare : Merchant of Venice OR
- Shakespeare : Romeo and Juliet
Second Year : English Literature III Updated 17.1.2014
English and American Poetry
-
Alfred
Lord Tennyson: 1809-1892, Charge of the light Brigade
-
Wilfred
Owen: 1893-1918, Dulce Et Decorum Est.
-
Zigfrid
Sassoon: 1886- 1967, How to Die
-
William
Shakespeare: 1564-1616, Let me not to the Marriage of True Minds,
Nor Marble
nor the Gilded Monument
-
John
Donne: 1572-1631, The Good Morrow
Sri
Lankan and Post-colonial Poetry
-
Patrick
Fernando, Fisherman Mourned by his Wife
-
Derek
Walcott, Far Cry from Africa
Short Stories
-
Saki:
Open Window
-
Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Dying Detective
Drama
-
Arthur
Miller: The Death of a Salesman or
-
Bernard
Shaw: The Arms and the Man
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